Introducing rabbitmq-status plugin

RabbitMQ is a becoming decent product, but it shares some of the common problems of young software – for example, beginners have a hard time understanding what happens under the hood. Don’t get me wrong, Rabbit generally works perfectly as a black-box. But at some point, when things go wrong or when Rabbit needs to be added to a monitoring infrastructure, it becomes necessary to understand more about the internals. This is when things get difficult.

I was wondering how we could address this issue and decided that Rabbit should serve a simple http status page similar to status pages that are known from Apache or Haproxy projects.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s the screenshot of rabbitmq-server in action:

The status page shows memory, file descriptors and Erlang PIDS usage. You can also see basic information about connections and queues.

Installation

The installation is pretty straightforward. As with other RabbitMQ plugins, all you need to do is grab the compiled .ez binaries, put them in the correct place and then run the command: rabbitmq-activate-plugins.

Usage

Once you’re done with that, you should be able to access the local webserver under port 55672. You need to supply valid RabbitMQ username/password. The default URL should work in most cases: http://guest:guest@127.0.0.1:55672/.

Since approximately 2.1.0 or so we haven’t been maintaining the status plugin any more – it’s replaced by the management plugin which does everything the status plugin did and a great deal more. You can download precompiled binaries from: